Remake the World
by Thessaly
Summary: He's the Dreamer, she said. He can remake the world. Little ScaraGazz snippet with some scolding from Khashoggi. Rating high for language only.


"Everyone saw it differently; the most commonly held belief was that she'd given up, hadn't dreamed enough, hadn't wanted it enough. Hadn't wanted it at all." _Not a Dry Eye in the House_, BlueBohemian. 

----

Transport to Lucerne took two hours; the subsequent hike four, and evening was falling when he found the bus, purple in the twilight. There were curtains in the back and a fire stoked on one side. _Jackpot_. He stood and looked at it for a long moment, then said, "Come out, come out wherever you are."

The back door opened and a familiar head poked out. "What," she said shortly, "the fuck?" Hands in black cut-offs and feet in combat boots followed. "Ain't ya heard of privacy?"

"No." Andrei Khashoggi crossed his arms and waited.

"How come you always stand where you look scary?"

"Habit." He looked her over, this girl the Dreamer loved. Her hair was worse than usual; it had, at some point before she left, been cut and styled a bit, which suited her, but it appeared that in protracted tantrums, she returned to form. Her trousers had seen better days. The boots he knew and respected and unless he was very much mistaken, the shirt had once belonged to Galileo. She had acquired a necklace shaped like an ankh, but that was it. Scaramouche the fighter, fists curled and face screwed up in adolescent annoyance.

She changed position slightly, resting one hand on her hip. "Can I help you?" The politeness was exaggerated, juvenile.

"Not me personally."

"Well _that's_ good."

"What," he said finally, "are you doing in the middle of Switzerland?"

"None of your damn business."

"It's mind if I choose to make it mine."

"I ain't your business, pig."

"No," he said. "But the Dreamer is."

"Like hell."

"He is. He has been my business since you were still a delinquent with blonde hair and acne, playing with motherboards in Music History."

"I did _not_ have blonde hair!"

"Back when you were thirteen you did. Now listen to me, you self-indulgent adolescent."

"Hey, now." She crossed her arms over her chest. "I got two words for you, pig, and they sound like Duck Toff. I can make you leave."

"Oh, _really_?" Khashoggi lifted an eyebrow. "Unless you've got mace and a hyper-laser, I very much doubt it. Do you _know_ what you're doing to Galileo?"

"Godammit," she said, her voice shaking, "this is _not_ your business, you crazed policeman."

"Are you planning on coming back any time soon? I only ask because he's killing himself over you and we'd all appreciate you making up your mind sooner rather than later."

"Killing himself my arse; it's lost puppy syndrome. How would _you_ know?"

"How would I not know?"

She clawed the mat of hair out her eyes impatiently. "Says you."

Khashoggi stayed very still for a moment, then lifted his chin slightly. "Christ," he said. "You're even more of a mess than I thought you were. Hands."

"What?"

"Show me your hands."

"What?"

Khashoggi reached out and grabbed the girl's closest hand, pushing the glove back. Her wrists were thin and clearly-defined, muscled and smooth and dotted with oil-stains. "Well, thank god for that," he said, dropping her hand. "Nice to know at least one of you has self-control."

Scaramouche stared at him for a long minute. "Shi-it," she said.

"You mean you didn't expect it?" He was angry with her, even more than he had been before he left. "You _knew_. You knew how he thinks and how he reacts to pressure. You _knew_ what would happen if you left."

"Oh, Jesus…I didn't –"

"Think? No, clearly not."

She dropped her hands in a little, desperate gesture. "Get in the van; I can't see you and you scare the shit out of me looming like that."

He paused, then followed, ducking under the doorway. The inside was like a gypsy caravan, the walls hung in faded, patterned fabric and tiny, smoked-glass bulbs lining the ceiling. The back was full of pillows and tossed sheets of paper – music scores by the looks of them. The front seat, as far as he could tell, was stacked with guitar shapes. Had she been building guitars for six months? Christ. What a thing for the bad arse rocker chick.

Khashoggi leaned against a cushion and watched her. She sat cross-legged, hands resting on her knees and her face self-possessed and mostly calm. "Right. Gazz is fucked-up and it's my fault. Did you really come all the way here to tell me that?"

"Yes."

"Look, I _knew_ he was fucked-up. Everybody knows that. All he needs is someone to hang onto; why does it have to be me?"

"Who else is it going to be?"

"Charlotte." Her face flickered for a moment. "Mads, Cheeky Fairy, Georgie, Delilah, Evita; he can have any of them, so why does he need a short, fat, dysfunctional little head-case who likes her guitar better than her dude?"

Khashoggi watched her in the dim light. "There's no accounting for taste."

"Damn right." Scaramouche moved, a slight fidget she had somehow picked up from the Dreamer, just as he had picked up an edge of sarcasm from her. "_Fuck_. Tell me something, Kashers - how do you and Meat work?"

"Contrary to popular belief, I'm not actually desperate." Scaramouche almost smiled and then, for a moment, she just looked lost. Khashoggi, oddly touched, elaborated. "Love isn't the right word. It implies…effort or making a choice. Do you love your hands? They're just there. Part of you."

"Meat and Khashoggi, Moet and Chandon," said Scara softly. "You just _are_. It's like breathing or something. Two halves to the same thing. Is that why you're not together anymore?"

"One of the reasons."

"Um-hmm." She slapped her legs in a gentle unconscious rhythm. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Yes."

"What's he working on? Right now?"

"Nothing scored for guitar."

She winced. "Oh, now _that's_ a surprise. No, really, what?"

Khashoggi passed her the paper. "I took it from the studio."

Scaramouche read quickly and he watched as her face changed. A rapid blink and a slight quiver as she crumpled the paper. "'S crap," she said. But she didn't offer to give it back.

"Why leave?"

She looked up at him. She looked young without makeup. "Head-over-arse insane, that's why. All these people, all the time. They're awesome and they rock and all that, but they never _go away_. When I was really little, I used to go virtual hiking with my parents. And then on the weekends, sometimes we'd transport out to like Preston or wherever and walk around for real.

It was beautiful, you know? It's so…quiet. All you can hear is the wind and things going crunch when you step on them. And rocks. Well, there used to be rocks, anyway. I felt like there weren't any more edges to the world and I could just walk and walk and walk and nothing would ever end.

I mean, obviously it did – it always got dark and we had to go home and I had to do my homework, blah, blah, blah. But there was always this…little bit of me that was mad about those big spaces. Running was like that, you know. We didn't know where we were going, so we could go anywhere, and we ended up," she looked around the van, "here. And it was safe and it might as well have been the edge of the universe. And everything was beautiful." Her voice shook a little bit. "He was, anyway. Hell, even _I_ was beautiful, you know? He thought I was, so I was." She closed her hands on her knees and said softly, "He's the Dreamer – he can remake the world."

"Very pretty," said Commander Khashoggi. "If you feel that way, why are you still here?"

"Because he pisses me off." She was back on her own ground again. "It's always the Music, the Songs, the Vibe, the Band, and the goddamn Chick. I'm not a chick, I'm a guitar-player. I'm _me_, not some durr-brain Gaga groupie. And I'm also not just some ditzy accessory who happens to play a magic guitar. I'm _good_." She took a breath. "I'm the best, and I don't think he's really OK with that either.

"So it's a creative differences thing?" His tone was scathing and he saw her twitch. _Good._

"No, it's a me thing. I don't need him. I never needed him."

Khashoggi leaned over and caught her arms. She tensed, looked up and stared him full in the eyes. "Well, he fucking needed _you_! How dare you do that to anybody, let alone _Galileo Figaro_? How dare you take what they give you and throw it back at them like that? I realize 'responsibility' is a big word for a little girl like you, but I thought maybe you understood it. What gives you that right to abandon?"

Her lips pinched together. "I told him I was going."

"Yes, you said, 'I'm going. Have fun.' That is hardly acceptable."

"Oh, for god's sake." Scaramouche tried to struggle free. "Don't start giving me this crap about _acceptable_. What are you, my Dad? He drank himself to death. My Mum? She's probly still in a hospital somewhere. My teacher? I don't _think_ so. You're a turncoat traitor son of a bitch bastard who doesn't know _shit_ about acceptable!"

Khashoggi let her go and sat back. "And you're a hard-arse self-centered bitch with commitment problems. So what?"

"So what," she echoed. "Look, you're here now and you're pissing me off. Just go to sleep and you can yell at me some more tomorrow."

----

She didn't _want_ to hear them, but Khashoggi's words made it into her head. He stood there blankly and looked at her, almost emotionless, as he spoke. He did that a lot, and it was _creepy_. She wondered what Meat saw in him, this tall, gaunt man with his scarred face and bleached hair. Once or twice she caught a mesmerizing movement in his hands with their graceful, articulated fingers. Perhaps there was something there. Or there wasn't.

She listened to him, feeling heavy and awkward and defensive – she always felt like this around the Commander. Wrong-footed, even when she was sitting. Scaramouche tied her hair back and fetched a new Scaramark 8 from the front seat. She'd finished a few, and she liked this one the best. Didn't compare to Brian's Axe, obviously, but she was happy with it. She grabbed a lightbox and crawled out of the van, a little ways away from the sleeping police officer, then spread out the piece of paper. Why did Gazz have to send someone out after her? Why now? He had lousy handwriting. She moved the light closer and began to sound out the metre of the piece. Something was fluttering in the back of her mind, a four-four time butterfly; a bubble of a thought.

It might work.

She ran through a few chords on the Scaramark 8, then returned soft-footed to the bus to get the Axe. It was a labour of love to tune it, a pleasure almost sensual in the familiar ridges under her calloused fingers and the dig of the tuning pegs. She had learned to hear the notes as they should be. That was weird, that part: she had played it when she picked it up, but as she learned more, she did more and the Axe less. Like now, she tuned it herself, while in the first few months it had never needed tuning. Never mind. She played to herself to get her fingers warm, then looked at the new song again.

_It's only forever – it's not long at all_

_Lost and lonely _

_Life can be easy_

_It's not always swell_

_Don't tell me truth doesn't hurt, little girl_

'_Cause it hurts like hell_

Very Gazz.

She let her fingers fool – bah _bah_ bah-buh-buh buuuuuh – like clarion chords on the guitar. It could be dance piece, maybe. It should be in F and have a pretty strong underbeat – one and a two, one and a two – and a smoother melody line. Deceptively upbeat. She fingered the chords; oh yes, she knew how he thought and how he would put together a song. The problem, of course, happened when she thought a song should go together differently than his fucking Dreaminess Galileo Figaro. He would turn it into some kind of moaning power ballad to get the lighters out and make the crowd sway.

Nope. This one should make them dance. "No, you don't get it, Scara – the lyrics and the music have to _match_," he'd said. Not necessarily. Not for this one. It wasn't a miserable emo fest; it was fun. Alive. Underground. She wondered in whose brain he'd dug this one up.

She played with it for another hour or so. This was the fun part – the experimenting, trying to find what would fit, like Madonna shopping. When she couldn't see anymore, she crawled back into the bus and curled up on her cushions.

She woke the next morning with the tune butterfly flapping in her head – solid enough to be a tune bird by this point – and knew that it was time to go back. _She_ might not want to, but there was the shape of an oddly gentle song pulling her back in and she knew that, no matter what other things she could fight, music wasn't one of them. Khashoggi found her outside the bus making coffee, her hair wet and flat from washing. She looked at him and said, shortly, "All right, I'll go. Do you have to take me?"

He smiled, rather unexpectedly. "No."

"_Good_. So piss off and announce me or whatever."

She found the beat again on the transport, leaning her head on the window. It wasn't going anywhere – why not? She fished out a computer-pad and called up a score template. She wasn't wild about longhand, but somehow Gazz and Pop had badgered all of them into scoring by hand. She grasped the pen a little awkwardly and began drawing notes. Four four, F? No, E. She chewed a loose strand of hair and fingered an imaginary guitar with her left hand.

----

The walk back to – what? – Home, the Dreamer's House (and that sounds _right_ pathetic; she blamed Bob for that one) was too short. The Bohemians loitering in the atrium saw her come in, and they all backed out of her way. She ignored them. If she decided to stay, she could talk to them later.

Later.

Gazz was upstairs in the studio, kneeling in front of the sound deck, fiddling with a sound knob. Scara sized up his back, shirted and sticking between his shoulders. She crossed her arms and waited until he turned. He stared at her like he'd been hit. "You –" He cleared his throat, rubbed his nose awkwardly.

"What've you been doing?" She didn't move and continued to watch.

"I've been messing around with a few things with, um, with M-mozart." He bit his lip. "Will you listen?"

"I might do. Should I get my lighter out?"

"No, it's not rock. Well, not really. It's like…both. Just, you know, listen." He messed with the sound equipment, then hit play and stood back.

Scara, ready to be annoyed, stood still. It was…unexpected. She'd listened to Mozart's endless lectures about Classical and form and structure and crap, but she hadn't really listened to his music. Whatever was playing definitely belonged to Mozart, not Gazz. She wasn't sure what the instruments were, but they sounded nice, in the sort of textured and quiet way that acoustics did.

She was thinking about the sound, not the actual shape of it, when she noticed that her hands, independent of her brain, were moving in time with the chords and she realized with a shock that went from shoulders to feet that what she was hearing was Live Forever. It was a different kind of sound, obviously – all those lower strings with a higher one (violin? She thought that was the name) rising out of the middle like a ray of light, but it was the same _song_. The same slow rise of seconds that tugged at the heart-strings, transfigured from the raw power of rock to the softer shadings of light and shadows you got from acoustics.

She looked up at him in confused surprise. "_You_ did _that_?"

He shrugged. "Me and Mozart. Together. It was nice not having words to mess with. It's…gentler." The music soared for the sky and called the way it never had with a guitar. _Oh, god._ "Hey," he said, changing the track, tossing a shy grin her way. "How bout this one?" A warm buzz of low strings, then the gentle rippling effect of a piano, spinning Love of My Life out into something elegant and playful. Gazz danced on the spot, moving to the music and singing very softly under the piano, "Bring it back, bring it back – don't take it away…you don't know what it means to-oo me!" He stopped and glanced at her. The piano went into the bridge, the strings welling up in a mass of sound. "Sorry. You don't like my dancing; it's kind of stupid anyway, and I. Um. Well?"

"Not exactly rock'n'roll, but it's cute." She held his eyes a moment longer. "I'm back on my own terms, Gazz, just so we get that clear. I'm the guitar player. I'm not your baby or your chick or your groupie, I'm just the bitch with the axe. Got it?" He nodded. "Good." She turned and walked out of the room without looking back. She didn't want to look back in case he started dancing in the sunlight again, lithe and graceful and smiling, like his damned beautiful music.

**A/N** _This one comes from Blue Bohemian's "Not a Dry Eye in the House" because when I read it I thought, "No way, Scara would never walk out." But then I started to wonder WHY she might, if she did, and what happened next. This is just the shape of the answer, but it's a start. Obviously there needs to be a disclaimer that I don't own much at all - character and situation belong to Elton and the musical crew. There's also a nod to David Bowie's "Underground" and Tolga Kashif's Queen Symphony. Go have a listen - it's quite strange. In a good way.  
Besides, it wouldn't really be summer without me posting some kind of Scara/Gazz fluff, now would it?_


End file.
